1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a fluid jet device that is compact and lightweight yet produces a jet of fluid by strong high-frequency pulsation.
2. Related Art
A previous fluid jet device for use to cut open or cut and remove living body tissue is known with a fluid jet generation method of producing jets of pulsating fluid at high speed. For producing jets of fluid at high-speed as such, the fluid jet device is provided with means for flowing a fluid into a fluid chamber, and intermittently generates steam bubbles from the fluid using heating means in the fluid chamber so that the internal pressure is intermittently increased in the fluid chamber. An example includes Patent Document 1 (JP-T-2003-500098).
According to Patent Document 1, a fluid has been instantaneously heated by discharge of a high-voltage electrode or others, and utilizing the pressure generated by such heating, higher-speed jets of fluid have been produced. Thus produced jets of fluid can be used to selectively cut and remove soft tissue of living bodies during surgeries or others.
The problem with the fluid jet device of Patent Document 1 is that, however, jets of fluid coming therefrom are heated because of the configuration of producing jets of fluid by steam bubbles of the fluid. The heat may thus adversely affect any normal tissue or others. There is another problem that the actually-possible frequency for driving is about 100 Hz at the maximum because producing a jet of fluid is not allowed until the steam bubbles are disappeared.
Moreover, although Patent Document 1 describes, in the part of “Description of Exemplary Embodiments”, an application example of using a piezoelectric element as jet means, but there is no description about specific implementation thereof.
The fluid jet device of Patent Document 1 has still another problem that the device cannot be available for use to remove any thrombus in blood vessels by jets of fluid directed from a fluid jet aperture section provided at the tip of a catheter, for example. This is because, for such a use, there needs to produce jets of fluid from the tip end of a thin flexible tube, but with the configuration of Patent Document 1, no pulsation can be transmitted thereby.